alt Hacker NewsIt's an interesting idea, and it may be something that could be mathematically justified, but I do think this is an abuse of Lindy's Law in the absence of such a justification. Per Wikipedia [1]:
"The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, like books, those that do not have an "unavoidable expiration date"."
And later in the article you can see the mathematical formulation which says the law holds for things with a Pareto distribution [2]. I'd want to see some sort of good analysis that "the life span of exponential growth curves" is drawn from some Pareto distribution. I don't think it's completely out of the question. But I'm also nowhere near confident enough that it is a true statement to casually apply Lindy's Law to it.
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People who correctly cite the Lindy effect won't look like people who correctly cite the Lindy effect.
The analysis in the article explains why it applies to any phenomena that we might be able to notice.
The argument given is the same as the one that I first ran across, not by that name, in https://www.nature.com/articles/363315a0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument claims that it was a rediscovery of something that was hypothesized a decade article.
I hadn't tried to give it a name, or thought to apply it outside of that context.
As for the mathematical qualms, I'm a big believer in not letting formal mathematical technicalities get in the way of adopting an effective heuristic. And the heuristic reasoning here is compelling enough that I would like to adopt it.